


waking dreams

by grapehyasynth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 21:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11045046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: first chapter moved over from my drabbles collection, "I had a nightmare about you and wanted to make sure you're okay", second chapter new as of 5/30/17.au sweetness, best friends in denial.





	1. Chapter 1

“Fitz, please open the door!” Jemma calls over her own incessant knocking. “I’m sure you’re sleeping peacefully and I’ll apologize profusely via cheese platters at Deborah’s later but for now—“

The door swings open more quickly than she’d expected, given that it’s nearly 1AM and at this hour Fitz is most likely to have fallen asleep eating gummy candies in bed.

“Oh thank God,” she whimpers, rushing towards him and grabbing his forearms to steady herself. “I just had the most terrible dream and I had to check – you were in the dream, you’d gone on vacation to some beautiful island that normally I’d find idyllic but there were all these men with machine guns and— you know what they say about people dying in dreams and they shot you and there was blood everywhere and—”

She’s only now just processing what she’s actually seeing. Fitz isn’t in his pajamas, or even in the green-and-white plaid button-up he’d worn to work. He’s wearing a _suit_ – he _hates_ suits. And there’s no candy sugar around his mouth; instead, there’s something that looks a lot like a tomato sauce stain at the bottom of his tie. And he smells nice. Like, _distractingly_ nice.

“Jemma—”

There’s a girl on his couch. Jemma can see her now, peeking around Fitz’s shoulder.

“You were on a date,” she says miserably, feeling truly silly in her bare feet and ratty pajamas, with her childish need to make sure he’s okay when _obviously_ he wasn’t running away from assassins; just because they’re best friends and live just a floor apart doesn’t mean she has any right to— “I’m _so_ sorry,” she winces, to him but with an apologetic glance at his date as well, who gives her a weak and confused smile. “I’m the worst – Given the hour you were obviously mid-snog and I’ve just gone and ruined the whole thing – you really should’ve told me, Fitz, I could’ve called Bobbi with my stupid nightmare and left you alone to – well, I’ll just see myself back up to my apartment, I’m so sorry—“

But she’s choking back tears because it might’ve been a dream but in it she’d knelt over Fitz’s lifeless body and she could really just use a reassurance that the blood she swears she can still feel on her hands wasn’t real—

“Back in a minute,” Fitz says quietly to his date, and then he closes the door part of the way, catching Jemma’s wrist as she makes to turn away. “Come here.”

“What are you doing?” she protests weakly as he makes to hug her. “I’m disgusting and you’re all dressed up—“ It’s true, she’d woken in a cold sweat; there are damp spots around her collar and under her arms and across her stomach.

“Just accept the damn hug,” he sighs.

He slides against her too easily, his shoulders tucking under her arms, hers settling across the broadest part of his back, her hands toying with the intentional crease of his shirt. She feels entirely pathetic for needing this. But there’s his heart, steady against her chest, and there’s his cool ear pressed to her neck, and as she’s running inventory to make sure he’s all here he exhales, just a bit, as if he, too, has never felt more peaceful than when they are right here, together.

“Well, there goes my cologne,” he grumbles good-naturedly, making a show of wiping her sweat from his neck as they separate.

“If she doesn’t want to sleep with you tell her I’ll pay for your next date. Or something.”

“Gross. Go back to bed, Simmons.”

She hesitates until he’s about to close the door, then – “Fitz?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

He taps the door handle a few times, smiling softly at the floor. “G’night, Simmons.”

 

 

She hears them whispering goodbyes in the stairwell not too long after – it’s the only way she knows it’s safe to descend to his apartment for their weekly lazy, late-Sunday-morning pajama brunch: Bloody Marys, pancakes, slices of avocado and mango. They sit side-by-side at the marble counter of his island, watching pigeons gather on his fire escape.

With her mouth full of pancake so it will seem like an offhand, spur-of-the-moment question, she asks, “What was her name again? I realized after I left that I recognized her from the IT department.”

“Felicity,” he replies without looking up.

“Are you going to see her again?” Casual things that best friends normally ask each other, right?

He shrugs, reaching across her for the syrup. “Probably not.”

She groans and pantomimes face-planting into her plate. “God, it’s all my fault, isn’t it?”

“It is, actually.” His lips press together briefly, nervously. “She said she’d known even before we went to dinner that I would always choose you.”

“Oh, Fitz, that’s—” Mortifying? True? Swooningly adorable? “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, I’m supposed to be your wingman not your cockblock – I’ll go to speak with her tomorrow, clear the air—“

His hand covers hers on the tabletop and she falls silent.

“She was right,” he says simply. “People just don’t understand our friendship, Jemma. But I’m not willing to sacrifice it.”

She thinks about how they must look. Their symbiosis ( _not_ codependence, thank you), their routines, their proximity (physical and otherwise). She’s even wearing an old pair of his pajama bottoms; he’d still been growing when they first met, and she likes things that’ve been Fitz-pre-worn.

She can only swallow and nod and try not to think about the syrup his tongue is swiping off his lower lip or how sweet it would taste if they –

His hand shifts so he’s holding hers properly. He eats with his non-dominant hand for the rest of the meal.

Totally normal, best friend behavior.

Jemma has very different dreams that night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone requested this continuation but i honestly cannot remember who because it was probably requested something like seven months ago!

Jemma falls asleep on his couch sometime between Fitz’s third almost-revelation on his project (all three of which lead to dead ends, but talking it out usually helps) and the beginning of the six o’clock news. She’s all grimy from her excessive exertion at the gym, but her lips are slightly parted and her face looks utterly ridiculous and a tad bit adorable smushed up against his scratchy thrift-store pillow and he can’t bring himself to boot her to a less absorbent surface.

Instead, he covers her with a blanket, tucking it around her ankles and shoulders and snugging it under her chin. He dims the lights, reheats yesterday’s leftover lasagna – Jemma had grabbed a sandwich on her way home, or he’d wake her to eat as well – and changes out of his work clothes, sitting at the kitchen counter in the dark and scrolling through his phone.

An email sets his phone vibrating and he snorts – it’s from Hunter, more screenshots of ‘hot chicks’ from his friend’s dating app of choice. It’s part of Hunter’s campaign to get Fitz out and meeting people, “people other than Jemma – that’s not healthy, mate”.

He glances up at Jemma’s still form on the couch. Hunter doesn’t understand. Neither do the girls he’s taken to dinner or movies or even science conventions, and he doesn’t blame them. Jemma’s his best friend, but it – it’s something beyond that, and that’s where it gets messy.

He doesn’t _want_ other people.

He already has everything he could ever want in this world.

Eventually, after he’s washed his dishes with just a quiet trickle of water and read for half an hour in his room, he decides it’s time to send her home. If it were a weekend night, he’d let her stay there, or consider half-carrying, half-pushing her to his own bedroom so he could take the sofa. But if she wakes up in his apartment on a work day she’ll be frantic, even if he sets his alarm to the preposterously godawful crack of dawn time she gets up.  

She’s curled in on herself a bit, and as he approaches he can hear her mumbling. Nothing comprehensible, but he grins nonetheless. He wonders if she’s telling someone off in her dreams; it would be quite characteristic.

“Jemma,” he murmurs, kneeling beside the couch. Her head twitches, mouth scrunching somewhat petulantly, but she doesn’t wake up. “Jemma, you’ve got to go,” he persists, running the back of his knuckles over the bit of her arm that’s come out from under the blankets.

She groans, but her eyelashes flutter and she finally stirs, meeting his gaze and scowling. “Why?”

“Work tomorrow.”

“Nnnn,” she responds, coherently.

“You talk in your sleep,” he informed her, irrationally proud of himself for knowing this now, for being privy to something so innocently intimate. “Were you having another bad dream?”

“No,” she says slowly, pushing herself up onto one elbow so they’re level. “You were in it, though.”

“Must’ve been a real nightmare, then.”

She laughs, her head falling forward against his upper arm, and even though he knows it was a terrible joke and she’s still sleepy and she’s only finds him funny because they’re such close friends, her reaction still palpably warms his chest.

Jemma shakes her head against him, her forehead rocking across his slight bicep. “Actually, it was quite lovely,” she admits softly.

He hesitates, but there’s nothing for it. She has a gravity to her that only he seems to feel, or that only he is unable to resist. Recognizing the tenderness of this moment, with her in the darkness, he tilts his head so he can kiss her hair, just slightly.

“Sometimes I—“ It’s not too late, he can stop this train; but she’s brought her head up to look at him and though he can avoid her gaze, focusing on her wrist where his hand is still laid across her pulse point, she compels him to finish. He can always play it off as a joke, later, if she doesn’t receive it well. “Sometimes I, uh, dream about you too.”

Her shocked exhale stutters across his cheek, but before he even has time to flinch and retract, she is pressing her lips to the corner of his mouth, tilting his chin up with a gentle touch, and kissing him in earnest.


End file.
